NOISES BEFORE WAR
Gunderson, Robert Gray
Noises Before War AND THE WAR CAME, by Kenneth M. Stampp. Louisiana State University Press. 331 pp. 4.50. Reviewed by Robert Gray Gunderson DURING the tense winter of 1860-61, hysteria prompted...
...A divided nation was completing its psychological preparations for war...
...The final paragraph of And The War Came summarizes the Civil War tragedy which ended "with the rich richer and the slaves only half free": "Yankees went to war animated by the highest ideals of the 19th Century middle classes . . • [But] the most striking products of their crusade were the shoddy aristocracy of the North and the ragged children of the South...
...Extremists on both sides of the Ohio were issuing calls-to-arms...
...In Massachusetts, an advocate of preventive war ominously warned his countrymen: "By trying to gain time we may lose it . . . One campaign . . . would settle the matter...
...and it might be finished before haying time...
...We are trying to keep the peace," declared Samuel Ryan Curtis in the House of Representatives, "and for the purpose of keeping the peace, we want an Army and a Navy...
...Stampp effectively analyzes the semantic confusions which permitted each side to hold fundamentally different interpretations of the Constitution and which enabled each to believe the other the aggressor...
...Disaster came," Stampp concludes, "not because the leaders on either side failed to show greater wisdom"—but because the forces making for war, once released, "became too powerful for human resistance...
...In this view, the Civil War generation was not so much a blundering generation as it was a generation trapped by its own attitudes and institutions...
...If there are similarities between A.D...
...Such pronouncements mustered soldiers who later were to discover that "a pointed abstraction might be as deadly as a pointed pike...
...Self-deception," says Stampp, "was a prerequisite for action . . . and painful cures seemed to require the ingenious sedative of soothing phrases...
...In the headlines of the Tribune, Horace Greeley daily proclaimed: "No negotiation with traitors...
...Fear that concession would destroy the Republican Party was, according to Stampp, "at least one factor, and often a surprisingly conscious one, which directed some of Lincoln's friends toward war...
...Nowhere is this sense of entrapment more apparent than in the discussion of compromise proposals...
...Radical and secessionist alike translated political expediency and economic interest into doctrines of high moral principle...
...Stampp's detached objectivity in evaluating these rationalizations will be criticized as "an escape from the severe demands of moral decision" by those who sympathize with Arthur M. Schles-inger, Jr., and his assertion that mankind's occasional "log jams must be burst by violence...
...In this impasse, one senses the helpless, frustrating position of the moderate caught between extremes, silenced by hysteria, and finally forced to take sides...
...1951, perhaps it is because humans once again may be about to plunge like lemmings down the mountain of hysteria into the deep fiord of self-destruction...
...In his analysis of the forces which led to war, Kenneth M. Stampp rejects Prof...
...1861 and A.D...
...Among the masses of Americans there were no victors—only the vanquished...
...Readers of this persuasion will find support in the extremist press of 1861 which declared that peace "rusts the national character" and causes the country to sink into "demoralization and decay...
...Reviewed by Robert Gray Gunderson DURING the tense winter of 1860-61, hysteria prompted the utterances of politicians and pervaded the thoughts of the people...
...J. G. Randall's concept of "a blundering generation," though indeed blunderers aplenty stumble through his chronicle...
...Conservatives from the Border States and from commercial centers proposed concessions which Republicans refused to make and which secessionists refused to entertain...
...Thus coercion became "the enforcement of law," and war measures found justification as means of guaranteeing peace...
...And The War Came is a survey of Northern opinion during this crisis...
...From Montgomery, Jeff Davis replied: "Time for compromise is past, and we are now determined to . . . make all who oppose us smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel...
Vol. 15 • April 1951 • No. 4
